Prince Andrew’s supposed fascination with teddy bears, particularly their arrangement on his bed, is depicted in a scene from the new Netflix film “Scoop.”
The thriller, released on Friday, revisits Prince Andrew’s association with disgraced financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as well as his controversial interview with Emily Maitlis on Newsnight.
In one particular scene, Andrew, portrayed by Rufus Sewell, is shown watching a news report announcing Epstein’s recent arrest on federal sex trafficking charges. Subsequently, he notices a palace chambermaid, played incidentally by Kate Winslet’s daughter Mia Threapleton, rearranging his teddy bears on his bed, albeit not in the correct order.
“How many times?” an exasperated Duke says to her. “How many times?” She says: “I’m sorry”.
Picking up one teddy bear, he asks in a patronising tone: “Where does he go? Simple question. Where does he go? A clue: He’s a marsupial. ‘Roo’, as in ‘kanga’, put them together, what do you get?”
“Roo-kanga,” she says, after a brief pause. “Go away! Go away!” an angry Andrew shouts.
The Duke’s fascination with his teddies was, apparently, not unfounded. According to The Sun, Andrew said back in 2010: “I’ve always collected teddy bears. Everywhere I went in the navy, I used to buy a little teddy bear, so I’ve got a collection from all over the world of one sort or another.”
In 2022, Charlotte Briggs, a former maid at Buckingham Palace, also informed the publication that during the nineties, she had the task of arranging the Duke’s toys in size order every morning. This would have been around the time when Andrew, now 64, was in his mid-thirties.
“As soon as I got the job, I was told about the teddies and it was drilled into me how he wanted them,” she said. “I even had a day’s training. It was so peculiar. After all, he was a grown man who had served in the Falklands.
“Each had to be carefully positioned. They were old-fashioned teddy bears – the Steiff ones – and nearly all of them had sailor suits on and hats. It took me half an hour to arrange them.
“Then at bedtime I had to take all the teddies off and arrange them around the room. They each had a set place. We had to stack the smaller ones in an unused fireplace, again in size order, to make them look pretty. His two favourite bears sat on two thrones either side of the bed. The others would sit at the foot of the bed on the floor.”
Former royal protection officer Paul Page, who served at Buckingham Palace from 1998 to 2004, also disclosed in the 2022 ITV documentary “Ghislaine, Prince Andrew, and the Paedophile” that he would frequently observe approximately 50 or 60 stuffed toys on the Duke’s bed.
“There was a card in a drawer and it was a picture of these bears all in situ,” he said. “The reason for the laminated picture was if those bears weren’t put back in the right order by the maids, he would shout and scream.”
